Now, where do you think Apple and MS might have learned this salubrious lesson, my fellow geek-watchers? Could it have been largely from watching Linux take off in Netbooks and cheap PCs? Might it possibly have something to do with the remarkable success of the Ubuntu Linux product and its increasingly sophisticated, feature-rich, but eminently small and functional OS? Linux desktops, led by GNOME and KDE, along with distros such as Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Linux Mint, and MEPIS, have been quietly carving the path that the corporate monsters of the software industry have at last chosen to follow: make thy kernel light, stable, and versatile, and let thy desktop be smart and slim, with only enough features to support and enhance the user’s experience, and no more.

And incidentally, would it be too much to ask of Mr. Ballmer or Mr. Jobs to simply say so, to give credit where it’s due? No, that wouldn’t be the corporate thing, the profitable thing, the we’re-number-one thing, the competitive thing to do. It would only be the fair thing.

Desktop

The trouble with this assumption — like many others — is that it easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. All interface designers that I met have told me that it is impossible to design a desktop application that includes all possible functionality or meets the need of every possible user. Besides, they add, if you tried, users would suffer the anxiety of having too many choices. And so you get file managers, for instance, that have less than a third of the functionality of basic commands like cp or mv.

Cathy and Earl Malmrose founded ZaReason several years ago. ZaReason is a Linux OEM that has long intrigued me for a number of reasons: they encourage customers to open their boxes and tinker, they specialize in OEM Linux boxes, and they demonstrate that there is still room for independent shops in the rough-and-tumble world of computer retailing. In many ways the independents out-perform the big businesses as they understand Linux and Linux users, and a Linux-only shop doesn’t have to contend with the pressures and restrictions that Microsoft puts on its partners.

One of the powers of the Linux command shell is the wealth of commands available to accomplish most any task. That amount of power can be intimidating to the less experienced users. Most typical computer users rarely open up a terminal window, or a DOS command box in Windows, unless they need to do some trouble shooting.

When you’re used to the world of Windows or OS X, Linux can seem a little unforgiving. Not only does command-line access hand over the complete keys to the manor to any unwitting user with access to the administrator’s account, there’s rarely a safety net should things go wrong. Despite advances in most Linux desktops (where the ubiquitous Trashcan safely buffers deleted files), you get no such protection from most system-specific configuration, installation and maintenance tools. And while it’s rare for anything to go wrong without your direct input, some accidents do happen, especially if you enjoy tinkering with the latest distro release each month. But this being Linux, there’s plenty you can do to dig yourself out of a hole, which is why it’s always a good idea to have a repair-worthy distribution close to hand when performing configuration and installation tasks.

Eyecandy is also very important. Most new and non technical users are not interested in code. What they see is the GUI. Make their distro look very cool and pretty and they will fall in love with it. You can get themes from Gnomelook.org. Lots of people like Apple computers because of aesthetics. This might seem superficial to you but we are talking about the non technical users switching over to Linux. Another great application is Compiz. If their computer is powerful enough you can give them excellent eyecandy with compiz. With themes and cool 3D effects you will be able to make their Linux desktop nicer than Windows or Mac OS. Show them a little razzle dazzle.

As a follow up to the Mesa 7.5 release that occurred back in mid-July, Brian Paul has now announced the release of Mesa 7.5.1. This point release brings a number of bug fixes and minor improvements, while a plethora of new work over the past few months has been going into what shall become Mesa 7.6.

The flexibility and extensibility of support for Linux file systems is a direct result of an abstracted set of interfaces. At the core of that set of interfaces is the virtual file system switch (VFS).

Applications

Opera’s browser share seems to be slipping a bit, at least according to the stats over on W3Schools. Chrome is making inroads with 7% of the market, Firefox commands 47.4% (slightly down from July), and Opera is at 2.1% for the third month in a row — which is down from 2.3% at the beginning of the year.

What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Improved Gecko integration by using Wine’s network layers.
– Use of external libmpg123 for mp3 decoding.
– Support for JPEG and PNG formats in WindowsCodecs.
– Many regression test fixes for Win64 and Windows 7.
– Various bug fixes.

I wanted to take a few minutes and share a couple of games that I enjoy quite often. I’ve never been one for the shoot-em-up games, rather I prefer games that put my brain to work solving problems. There are many “brain games” available for Linux, but I would like to let you know about two games that I use to feed my puzzling addiction.

Desktop Environments

The KDE community is proud to announce the location of next year’s Akademy: Tampere, Finland. Akademy is the yearly world conference held by the KDE community to celebrate the Free Software desktop and work towards the future of KDE.

After a successful Akademy 2009 on the Canary Islands, as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Akademy heads north to the birthplace of Linux where contributors will enjoy the midnight sun as they spend a week to present, plan and participate in the development of KDE software.

This week we saw finishing of work on new color management code; updating of libraw to stable 0.8.1 (28 new cameras comparing to previous 0.7.x stable release, API extension and fixes); optimizations in thumbnails display; preparations for 1.0-beta4 (released on 31st August).

Without a doubt digiKam has a lot to offer for the photographers among us. Unfortunately, it still has one glaring omission – a clone tool. You may have noticed that the original RAW image had some dust specks in the sky above the trees and in other parts of the clouds. In digiKam, the only tool available for trying to remove such things (other than cropping them out as I did here) is a tool called In-painting, found under Enhance > In-painting. However, that tool is not easy to use and is rather slow. With a proper clone tool, as available in most other photo editors, removing such items only takes a few seconds. The good news is that the digiKam developers have acknowledged this omission as a bug and we can expect to see it implemented in a future version of digiKam. In the mean time we can use the Gimp to take care of these items as a final touch up step.

I think you will agree that digiKam is an amazing open source tool. It has now become my main photo editor. If you are into photography, why not give it a try?

Experienced Linux administrators are likely to feel “right at home” with the installation process – I certainly did. Just about everything is there, presented clearly for your selection. It took me about an hour to get it installed on MMS. The only significant stumble was that Slackware uses the LILO bootloader, which I choose not to use, but even that wasn’t a major problem for me because I have to keep the openSolaris GRUB as the bootloader anyway, so I just told it to skip the LILO installation, and added Slackware to the openSolaris GRUB configuration file manually.

Red Hat Family

In the past few days, since I’ve been spending time at my sister’s house, I’ve used as single system the laptop I bought a few months ago, with runs Fedora 11. This has been my first time, since I started working in Gentoo, that I had to work with just a laptop (if you exclude the hospitalisations) and especially the first time since I started using Gentoo that I had to work with just another Linux distribution.

I’ve been using RHEL and its twins, CentOS and Oracle Unbreakable Linux, since day one, and I like them a lot for business server use. Of these releases, RHEL 5.4 is the most impressive of the lot, for these reasons:

Red Hat has released RHEL 5.4, a major point update of its commercial Linux distribution. This version introduces support for KVM, a significant milestone in Red Hat’s evolving virtualization strategy.

The distribution itself is a customized version of Red Hat Enterprise, with the most recent build dating from July 21 (for the 4.x branch). Most of the changes are on a site-specific basis — for instance, customizations for Fermi’s work as opposed to CERN.

GateIN melds JBoss Portal technologies with the eXo portal to create a new portal framework. Red Hat originally announced the partnership with eXo in June and the today’s availability of GateIN is the first deliverable.

1. Open Sourcing Clouds: Red Hat is warning attendees not to get locked into “proprietary” clouds from Microsoft (Windows Azure) and VMware, among others. Red Hat also took a few subtle shots at Oracle. Read between the lines and Red Hat sees the software market as a four horse race: Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware. For the sake of political correctness, The VAR Guy listed the four vendors alphabetically and refuses to choose favorites.

During his keynote presentation at the Red Hat Summit 2009 conference in Chicago, Whitehurst covered Red Hat talking points, including how the company is working to build future IT architectures that are flexible and allow its customers to meet demands of their own internal customers. Ellison, on the other hand, presents the opposite of flexibility, according to Whitehurst.

“Do you want to buy into Larry Ellison’s vision of what your IT infrastructure should be and what functionality you should provide to your customers, or should you listen to your customers and be flexible,” Whitehurst asked the crowd.

The EU Commission has just released a press release. They are not going to approve the Oracle takeover of Sun just yet anyway. Instead they are launching an in depth investigation of the deal, and it’s MySQL that seems to be the issue. Here’s the press release. This doesn’t mean it won’t happen, and the deadline for a final result of the investigation is January 19, 2010. But they are certainly asking the right question, namely, what happens to MySQL in Oracle’s hands?

Declaring that Microsoft and VMware will not drive cloud interoperability, Red Hat on Thursday detailed projects to proliferate use of clouds, including Project Hail, for putting applications onto a cloud.

Ubuntu

A PSE Ubuntu expert would working as a single point of contact for Canonical’s larger customers, becoming “virtual team members” with the company’s IT staff. Canonical says PSEs will provide regular technical and service reviews, share best-practice wisdom, and help companies optimize Ubuntu environments. Apparently, PSEs will even serve as advocates for the company for future Ubuntu releases.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project, announced today an advanced service and support offering that gives large enterprises with complex IT environments a highly-skilled, dedicated Canonical support professional.

Pre-releases like this are not recommended for anyone who needs a stable system or who isn’t comfortable with “occasional, even frequent breakage”, and should not be used on production systems. Ubuntu 9.10 is scheduled to be released on October 29th, 2009.

A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the fifth alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system, due for release in late October this year. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 9.10 development.

There are still quirks and such, we can’t yet get it to install ubuntu restricted extras by default, although we have gotten skype, libdvdcss2 and java to install by default, but once sorted out these OEM machine installs will have all the updates, all the common desktop packages, anything extra we want to add including replacement gdm theme or extra docs / manuals and it’s must less hassle than a CD or USB boot media.

Lubuntu

The just released test version of Lubuntu is a 340MB Live CD image and is based on the in-development upcoming version of Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala. The small size of the ISO image is not just down to the use of LXDE though; the distribution is also missing applications, such as office software.

Update: When asked exactly how the software can be obtained, MontaVista explained that separate licenses for MontaVista Linux 6 and SDK can be purchased by emailing the local sales department. Once the transaction is complete, a code will be sent allowing access to “MontaVista Zone” where the relevant downloads are available.

Mobile

While most wireless carriers have pledged support for the Android camp, T-Mobile’s G1 and myTouch 3G (also manufactured by HTC) are the only phones currently available Stateside powered by Google’s open-source platform.

The Android mobile operating system has officially expanded to a second U.S. wireless carrier. The HTC Hero smartphone, sporting the Google-backed Android OS, will be offered by Sprint this October; meanwhile, T-Mobile still also offers a line of Android handsets. The Hero is a feature-rich smartphone with a competitive price, but will it bump up against another top-shelf Sprint phone, the Palm Pre?

That’s the Android operating system running on this fairly slick looking ARCHOS tablet, which is concrete proof that Android is headed for more than just smartphones. As JKOnTheRun notes, the ARCHOS 5 Android-based Internet Tablet isn’t scheduled to go on sale until September 15th, but online retailer B&H jumped the gun and has a 500GB version of it shown and listed on its site. The ARCHOS 5 is a 5-inch slate, and JKOnTheRun reports that at one time B&H listed both HDD and SSD models, with prices ranging from $294 to $420, depending on configuration. Those specs have since been removed.

A Taiwanese research group unveiled a personal Internet device (PID) on Thursday made from its WiMax chips and a reference board that runs a version of Google’s Android mobile operating system tweaked for PIDs.

The Nokia N900 has some powerful guts. The device packs a powerful ARM Cortex-A8 processor and has 1GB of memory for running applications. The N900 also features OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration, opening a window of opportunity for high-quality mobile games.

Sharp says the device is targeted as users who look for a device that rolls Internet access, an electronic dictionary and an e-Book function into one. The PC-Z1 goes on sale in Japan on September 25 for $450 (in white and black). Sharp hasn’t said anything about international sales plans yet.

Finally, this week Inforworld.com named another open-source ERP provider, Compiere, as a recipient of its annual “Bossie” award in the Best Open Source Enterprise Software category. Compiere is another strong contender in the small-business ERP market; among other features, it offers a very well-regarded, cloud-based implementation of its ERP solution.

[...]

The other, based on an Ubuntu Server software stack, is being positioned as a better solution for companies that want more control over server configuration, including the use of complementary third-party components. Both are suitable for deployment as single-server solutions.

The current economic recession may be pummeling companies around the globe, but amid all the dire reports and grim statistics littering what can only be compared to a bloody battlefield, one oft-cited exception appears to be still standing tall: free and open source software.

AbiWord 2.7.10 Beta – Open source word processor, AbiWord, mainly fixes bugs associated with plugins but there are also a handful of fixes for some cross-platform issues. You’ll also want to check out this beta version if you’ve been having issues with importing and exporting Open Office XML docs.

Blender 2.49b – This is a full-blown point release of the powerful 3D modeling application that’s so powerful some artists use it to create full-length animated films.

Within about a year, after the camera is developed to his satisfaction, Levoy hopes to have to have the funding and the arrangements in place for an outside manufacturer to produce them in quantity, ideally for less than $1,000. Levoy would then provide them at cost to colleagues and their students at other universities.

The concept of hacking digital cameras has been around for a while, and there are even books on how to hack filters, hack remote controls for cameras, and more. For the Frankencamera effort, though, researchers envision an open source community contributing camera customizations that become available to everyone. I can envision some photography junkies that I know getting behind that idea.

Events

Calling all artists: If you want to try your hand at creating images as spectacular as the one on the left and win a prize for them, then you need to enter the Blender World Cup 2009 contest. This year’s topic focuses on “the other world which should contain fantasy, creativity, and interest.”

Maybe the most important thing you can do that day is learn more about Software Freedom and reflect on how it applies to you and your community. Checkout The Free Software Definition, learn Why Schools Should Use Exclusively Free Software and understand why Your Freedom Needs Free Software. Don’t take these at face value; think about them, and form your own opinion. Then act.

In March 2009 Cash4Gold filed a lawsuit, eventually obtaining a default judgment and injunction against the former employee “publishing any more confidential, proprietary information, and any defamatory information on the internet.” In July, Cash4Gold contacted Consumerist.com and Complaints Board, demanding that they remove the postings referring to the former employee’s allegations.

Intellectual Monopolies

After winning a $675,000 judgment against student Joel Tenenbaum, the RIAA is also demanding an injunction against him. Seems they aren’t amused that he appeared on The Pirate Bay’s front page, even if he had nothing to do with it.

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again